


like the dawn

by mildlyobsessive



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Physical Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildlyobsessive/pseuds/mildlyobsessive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan remembers this; scalding sunlight too bright in his eyes, bruises blossoming like morbid flowers on pale skin, a clouded head and sore muscles and birds chirping in a cacophony of inappropriately cheerful tunes.  The unrelenting word of a park bench on his back.</p><p>And the boy, of course.  The boy with with the midnight hair and kaleidoscope eyes and vaguely concerned expression standing over him, asking if he was okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like the dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Basically a song fic for 'Like the Dawn' by the Oh Hellos. It's a good song, so check that out if you want.
> 
> Trigger warning for some blood and a very abusive relationship.

**I was sleeping in the garden when I saw you first**

Dan remembers this; scalding sunlight too-bright in his eyes, bruises blossoming like morbid flowers on pale skin, a clouded head and sore muscles and birds chirping in a cacophony of inappropriately cheerful tunes. The unrelenting wood of a park bench on his back.

And the boy, of course. The boy with the midnight hair and kaleidoscope eyes and vaguely concerned expression standing over him, asking if he was okay.

What Dan doesn't remember is what time it is and where exactly he is and how he ended up wherever that may be, which makes 'are you okay?' a surprisingly difficult question to answer. 

And the mystery-boy is examining him closer now, voice sounding far off and tinny in Dan's ears, like he's talking through those soup-can telephones he made in school. He's asking something, an inquiry Dan can't make out through the aluminum-and-string distance between them. 

The boy leans in and asks again, more forcefully. "Are you okay? Where did all those bruises come from? Should I call someone?"

Dan looks down, and sure enough his arms are adorned in a Jackson Pollock painting of purples and blues and blacks, scattered like tattoos he'd rather not have.

Dan doesn't want to explain this again. Explanations lead to raised eyebrows and horrified eyes and advice, advice, advice, like anyone has any say in his life. He's a big boy now. He can take care of himself.

"I'm fine," he mutters.

Mystery-boy raises his eyebrows in a way that clearly conveys that he's not buying it. "Just from personal experience," he sighs. "When people say that they're 'fine,' they're usually the exact opposite. I'm guessing that logic still applies to boys passed out on park benches."

Dan's staring at his hands, at the discolored imprints of fingers wrapped around his wrist like a chain. A handcuff keeping him imprisoned, tied down like a bird with clipped wings. Because, even if he didn't want to admit to anyone, least of all himself, Dan knew how he had ended up on this bench. He knew where the bruises had come from. He knew because it had happened so many times before, and no matter how many times **_he_** got down on **_his_** knees and begged and pleaded and promised Dan the moon and sun and all the stars in the sky, it didn't stop. 

Dan was starting to think it never would.

The black-haired boy, still nervously watching Dan, clears his throat. "So," he says softly, as if he's speaking to something fragile, something so very close to shattering. "Are you _sure_ you're okay?"

"No," Dan whispers.

"I didn't think so. Now, do you want me to try and help, or do you want to be left on this bench?"

Dan doesn't know. If **_he_** can't find him later, **_he'll_** be angry. Dan doesn't like **_him_** angry. **_He's_** terrifying when **_he's_** angry.

 ** _He_** always seems to be angry, nowadays.

"I…I…"

"Hey, it's okay," the mystery-boy interjects. "How about we go get some coffee and you can talk if you want? It's on me."

Dan nods.

"Fantastic!" The boy exclaims. He reaches out a hand to Dan, a hand wrapping around bruises, fingers on faded fingerprints. Dan thinks he might throw up. "I'm Phil," the boy remarks, helping Dan onto his feet. "Just thought you might want to know."

"Dan. I-I'm Dan."

**He'd put me deep, deep under so that he could work**

"What happened to you?" Is not a question Dan knows how to answer. He knows _what_ happened. But knowing it in his heart and letting the words be coaxed out of his mouth, letting them fly through the air, public property for anyone's listening pleasure? Well, those are two very different things.

But it's all that Phil seems to want to know as Dan sits hunched over a cappuccino, trying very, very hard not to notice the bruises on his arms.

"Are you in a gang? The mafia?" Phil asks jokingly. He's trying to add levity, Dan supposes. He doesn't think it's working.

Dan just shakes his head, fingernails dug into his Styrofoam to-go cup.

Phil's false smile drops, and Dan briefly wonders why the boy he's known barely an hour cares so much. Curiosity, perhaps? A life so boring that he's resorted to getting his kicks from bruised boys knocked out on park benches?

"Dan, I want to help you," he sighs. "And I can't do that if you won't tell me what happened to you."

"I can't," Dan whispers, and looks down. His stomach lurches as his eyes are forced to notice the torrential downpour that is the bruises decorating every inch of skin, every blue vein juxtaposed against his pale complexion. _**he** told me he loved me_. Dan is drowning. Dan is suffocating, and no one is noticing. _Why would **he** lie?_

"Dan?" Phil's voice is overshadowed, smothered by the rain in his head, the lack of air in his lungs. Dan's lungs are filling up with water he can't breathe he _can't_. _Love isn't supposed to look like this_ , his brain taunts. _Love is bright eyes and butterflies in your stomach and promises that **he'll** actually keep. This? This is nothing. You are nothing._

"Shut up," Dan whispers, but even his own voice is being blocked by the storm that's brewed inside of him. " _Please_ , I can't, just _stop_.

"What?" Phil can't hear the rain, apparently. 

"I'm sorry," Dan is muttering now, more to himself than anything. "I'm sorry, I am, it won't happen again, I promise. **_He_** _promised_ ".

"Who promised what, Dan?"

Dan's a hurricane, a monsoon, too caught up in his own destruction to reply.

Phil touches his hand softly, gently, and Dan flinches. "How about this?" He asks. "I guess, but if I get it right you have to tell me."

A nod, a break, the eye of the storm.

"Okay, then. Were you … drunk?"

A shake of the head, one so slight that could be mistaken as a shiver if it wasn't July. 

"Okay, then. Did you mean to be on that bench, Dan?"

Another shiver-shake of dissent.

"Did someone put you there?"

Dan forces his head to nod.

"Were you drugged or something?"

Another bobble-headed motion that Phil takes to mean 'yes.'

"What? Dan, who did this to you? You have to call the police. You have to do _something_! How could someone treat you like that?"

Dan's relatively sure that his fingernails are about to push right through this paper-thin cup. " ** _He_** …" His voice breaks on the word. " ** _He_** doesn't like it when I move around too much."

The world's quiet for a split second, the storm in his mind stopping mid-screech as if to listen. Everything's still, and then Phil understands.

He understands and, fuck, that's the part Dan hates the most. 

Because Phil's eyes fly open and Dan can see the digust in them, the repulsion. Dan feels nauseous, he feels ashamed, he feels the way he did in ninth grade when he found out he didnt make it into the honors algebra class because of one shitty test.

Phil, in this situation, is that fucking test, the one grade that ruins everything. 

"Oh my god . . ." Phil sputters out. "Dan . . . I'm so sorry."

The words are much too loud for Dan's liking, much too open, much too _out there_. Because **_he'll_** hear. Dan knows **_he_** will. 

**_He_** always does.

**And like the dawn you broke the dark and my whole earth shook**

It was a month before Phil brought it up again. A month of awkward meet ups, a month of Dan resisting the urge to call Phil at two am when the storm was much to loud because he barely _knew_ him.

Phil had seemed to think otherwise when he had handed Dan the slip of scrap paper with the number scrawled on it. "We're friends, okay?" He had said pointedly. "You can me for anything. I mean it, Dan, anything at all."

Dan still felt too pathetic too call. 

It went on like this for thirty-two days before Dan went back to **_him_**.

It only took until the thirty-third day for Phil to notice the fresh spiderweb of bruises woven across arms. 

"Dan…"

"It's not a big deal, okay? It was an accident."

Sapphire eyes slid down to rest on the colony of marks. "An accident? Was the last time an accident too?"

"Phil, please…"

"Or do you not remember that? When he fucking drugged you so he could do whatever he wanted and then left you passed out on a park bench?"

Dan jerked his arm away. Phil's voice was lightning, a sordid blast that fried Dan right to the very bone. But, in all honesty, Dan was a bit more distracted by the way that Phil talked, how the word 'he' left his mouth effortly. Like it was nothing. A pronoun, a placeholder, a substitute. So different from how Dan saw it in his head, enunciated like it was the end-all be-all, the only thing that mattered. 

"Don't you get it? It wasn't an accident, Dan. It never has been."

Distant rain falling, richocheting off the ground just to hit Dan like a bullet. "You don't _get it_." Dan's pleading now, hysterical, desperate, thunderclaps of sobs suffocating him. " ** _He_** _loves_ me."

"Didn't you ever read Romeo and Juliet in school?"

Dan blinks. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Just answer the question."

"Yeah, I've read it."

"Then you should know that whatever you have with him, it isn't love, Dan. It's poison."

Dan raises his eyebrows. "What is love, then? Two teenagers who kill themselves after knowing each other for two days?"

Phil gives a laugh, half dead of humor. "Okay, minus the double suicide part."

"What other part are you referring to, then?" 

"I was thinking more along the lines of 'It is the east and Juliet is the sun.' You know, the mushy romantic parts."

"That doesn't change the fact that she was literally twelve."

Phil throws his arms up, kaleidoscope eyes rolling in exasperation. "Bad example, then. My point is, that's what love looked like to Shakespeare. Is that," Phil pulled Dan's sleeve up. "What love looks like to you?"

Dan can feel the storm pounding on the inside of this head, begging to be realeased, screaming and wailing please please _please_. "I…I don't know."

"It's not," Phil's voice is so very gentle. He reaches out to Dan's marred skin, fingertips lightly dancing ontop of spots of hatred. "It's not and you know it's not, and _god_ , Dan, you deserve so much better."

"He's all I have."

Phil shakes his head vigorously. "That's not true. You have me."

**I was sleeping in the garden when I saw you**

"He's a liar. You know that, right? That little slut you met in the park? He doesn't care."

The sickly sweet scent of booze ontop of the rancid reek of **_his_** breath. Hands wrapped around Dan's wrists like vices. A handprint redhot across his cheek. 

"I…I don't know what you're talking about."

Another backhanded slap, another mark buzzing like a bee against his skin.

"Liar. No wonder you two get along so well."

 ** _His_** hand wraps around Dan's neck, sqeezes.

"He's nothing." Dan chokes out. "No one, I promise."

 _ **He**_ chuckles, alcohol-laced laughter dripping from **_his_** mouth like venom. "More lies. Is that all you're fucking capable of, pretty boy?"

" _Please_ , I swe-"

The hand wrapped around Dan's throat tightens, effectively choking off any objections he would have cared to utter.

"You can't fucking _hide_ from me, Dan. I keep an eye on you because I _love_ you. I can't have you running off with some little whore."

"I wasn't running, I wasn't, I promise. I…I love you too." The words stuck in Dan's mouth like cotton, rough and throaty and hard to force out. Maybe it was the hand around his throat. Or maybe Dan just didn't know if it was true anymore.

 ** _He_** smiled, and Dan could sense the vodka curling off of him like smoke. God, **_he_** was _wasted_. "Good. That's good." **_His_** hand left Dan's neck, reaching up to smooth out his hair instead. "God, I wish you didn't make me hurt you like that."

Dan's stomach turned. "I…"

"What?" **_His_** voice was cautionary. A warning.

"Please…could you please just…maybe not hit me?"

"Come on, baby, you know it's not going to happen again."

"Yeah, I know, it's just that you said that last time, too." Dan's voice was timid, placid. It did little good.

Because the next thing he knew pain was washing over him in a tsunami-like wave and his mouth was filling with the unmistakable coppery taste of blood drip drip dripping from a newly split lip.

"What? Do you not trust me? You spend a week without that blue-eyed bitch and you think you're too good for me?"

Dan was too busy trying to spit the blood from his mouth to answer.

"That's how it is then? Pretty boy's too far up this own ass to care anymore?"

Dan didn't answer there was no point. Because **_he_** was a hurricane, a natural disaster designed to wipe out everything in **_His_** path, and what was one person to a storm of those proportions.

The hurricane reared back, waves crashing and lightning flashing like the heavens themselves were throwing a temper tantrum. No, not the heavens. Because Dan now realized that there was nothing ethereal about any of this. This wasn't heavenly.

No, this was hell, plain and simple.

**At last**

Phil found Dan the next morning, blood smeared across that aforementioned park bench.

**At last**

His skin was so covered in blue-black-red, so tainted with a macabre rainbow, that Phil thought he was dead.

He wasn't. Not quite.

**Bones of my bones**

The doctor's all pried for answers that he couldn't give, for names that he didn't dare disclose. 

Phil tried to help them. Fuck, how he tried. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't fucking _know!_ "

Dan didn't talk. Dan didn't move. Dan had two broken ribs, enough bruises for a professional wrestler, and a missing tooth to round it all out.

 ** _He_** called, daily. Unanswered ringing was met with death threats and finger-pointing.

Phil nearly screamed the first time he saw Dan in a hospital gown, the first time the word _mine_ was visible, etched into his thigh like Dan was nothing more than a block of wood.

The hospital was all foggy memories and distant crying and a feeling of emptiness that neither boy could shake.

**And flesh of my flesh**

Outside of the hospital was even worse. On the outside, they had to deal with the unrelenting nightmares, the jumping at loud noises, the way Dan ran his hand over the word carved into his leg like it was a promise of sorts.

Outside, there was changed phone numbers and new addresses and filed police reports.

But Phil held Dan on nights that the storm was too loud, when a hellish hurricane plaqued his every waking moment.

Phil was the one to leave butterfly kisses over yellowing bruises, to promise him a future without blemishes.

Dan never hesitated to call anymore.

Maybe Phil was just Dan's crutch, and maybe Dan was just Phil's arts and crafts project. Something to piece back together. Maybe.

Neither really gave much of a shit.

**At last**

Summer melted into autumn, and the boy with the kaleidoscope eyes and midnight hair sat on a park bench with the paper mache boy who'd had false words sculpted into him, vowing fake things. 

"Are you okay?" Phil asked, and this time Dan could answer honestly.

"I think so."

Dan remembers this; yellow leaves falling from tree branches with a crackle, the goodbye-calls of birds flying south, the sunlight dimmer but never gone.

And, the boy, of course. The boy who meant everything, sitting next to him like it was the most natural thing in the world. 

"Phil?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I figured out what love looks like to me."

Phil raises his eyebrows.

"This. Us sitting here right now." Dan takes a deep breath. "You."


End file.
